We had that before Starlink flooded the radio quiet zones with leakage.

Were that the case, there would have been nobody buying Starlink.

As they are, I think you are wrong.

My neighborhood has both cable and fiber, both >= 1Gbps, fairly cheap

My neighbor has starlink. I assume because they are MAGA.

Not everyone lives within a metro that has good infrastructure. This is even more true in developing countries.

More tech people need to go places.

I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.

Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.